Yeah, we've obviously shifted into the pedantic here. I'm just waiting for destruction that looks like that, but is fully environment driven. Like Frostbite 3 or something. The ability to wreck everything without is having to be designed to do so will be absolutely incredible. I'm also looking forward to this in racing sims:

Until that level of car damage is in racing games I think Burnout and Motorstorm will take the crown for best car damage.

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Probably. That type of driving physics tends to serve to irritate rather than excite me, though. That's why I like Forza Horizon. It's far from perfect, but it's close to Forza physics in an open world.

Yeah, but Burnout has terrible physics, and so does Need for Speed. Paradise might have been impressive in every other way, but the terrible physics put me off right from the start. That said, I've been playing Forza since Forza 1, and I still play Colin McRae Rally games.

All games are on PC. Don't compare it to Thief and its excellent. Unlike Thief & Splinter Cell's shadow focused stealth, Dishonored focuses on Rooftop stealth similar to Sly Cooper (though its way deeper than Sly Cooper). That said, there are some excellent shadows that went to waste (the first level comes to mind) and that's a shame since Dark Messiah of Might and Magic did shadow based stealth really well. Dishonored is the other AAA game I've been waiting for, especially since I loved Arx Fatalis & Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Despite the removal of some of my favorite features like Base Defense, Time Units, Stun Bombs, & Incendiary Rockets, XCOM: Enemy Unknown is the exact game that I've been waiting for years. Its an AAA turn-based XCOM (I preferred X-COM though) strategy game that did well (on PC anyways) & its an AAA game that requires your brain to be used. Black Mesa is the best mod ever. DayZ & the various Total War mods have met their match. I actually feel bad for not paying $50 for this, if incomplete games like Medal of Honor: Warfighter & Star Wars: The Old Republic can get charged for real money, then this deserves money too. Paradox's post release support is always phenomenal and Crusader Kings II: Legacy of Rome just continues to cement that tradition; this is an excellent DLC along with Crusader Kings II: Sword of Islam. Hey Ubisoft, take a note from Paradox when it comes to post release support. No, take 1,000 notes from Paradox when it comes to post release support. These guys fixed Hearts of Iron III and provided some excellent DLC for it & Anno 2070 still has DRM & no bug fixes or extra content (though I believe its getting a DLC soon).

That water.... Doesn't look like a repeating grid? This game can't have enough performance overhead to render and tessellate (oh wait, PS3 can't tessellate) the water. That has to be a texture based normal map...

Obviously a texture that size would overrun the memory available, so it's got to be 2 layers. First you have the actual water and its normal-maps, and then the white spray is applied semi-randomly through some sort of algorithm - unless it was placed manually.

Yeah, I'm not a graphics snob full stop, but when it comes to being on the bleeding edge I like to see what developers are accomplishing. Console development, in particular, is really interesting to me because it involves a ceiling, unlike PC development where the answer is always "throw more power at it."

Yep. The game does look very good in parts and atmospheric throughout...but the character and creature animations could use some more work IMO so far.

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That game ran like dog shit on my computer, which is a little surprising because newer games (ME3, Borderlands 2, XCOM) run at acceptable frame rates.

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It runs well enough on mine, but there is no option for enabling vsynch, and apparently even forcing it through Catalyst or editing config files doesn't do the trick either for some stupid reason, so I have to put up with screen tearing. Supposedly Rivatuner fixes it, but I couldn't get it to work.